


There's a Wedding Every 3 Minutes in Vegas

by nwhepcat



Category: Smallville
Genre: Angst, Clark Kent - Freeform, Father-Son Moment, Gen, Grief, jonathan kent - Freeform, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-22
Updated: 2009-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 13:37:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nwhepcat/pseuds/nwhepcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quickie marriage, easily erased, but some memories are harder to wipe away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's a Wedding Every 3 Minutes in Vegas

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Huzzlewhat for encouraging and reading and getting me into SV in the first place and Nestdweller for the beta. Standard disclaimer applies: not mine, just riffing.

He's supposed to be dazzled.

Clark realizes that, and he tries to look impressed as Geoff shows him Metropolis.

But he's been here before -- _lived_ here -- and now that he's been to Vegas the skyline and the lights don't seem that amazing. They don't saturate the sky the way the lights in Vegas do. The lights here do their job -- and then some -- but it's not the crazy, pointless excess he saw out there.

It's not even the lights themselves, but what they represent. Clark guesses his dad would call it wastefulness. Burning all that energy, just because they can. Every December when he was a kid, the family drove out to look at the Christmas lights on the Hendricks' farm. Each year there was a village-sized display, never the same twice, with Santa and his sleigh and a manger scene and angels, with loudspeakers playing carols. There'd be a stream of cars so long it would take more time getting to the farm than driving through the display. Clark's mom would delight in everything, point out little details, sing along with the carols, and Dad would make one low-key comment about how much money it must cost to burn all those lights for a solid month.

Las Vegas is like the Hendricks' farm times a million. And it's not just the lights, but how much green there is everywhere you look, trees and manicured lawns. After driving through the desert with Alicia, seeing all that green and knowing what made that possible. It's _crazy_. They irrigate _grass_.

It was such a rush to see it, to know what it all must cost. The red kryptonite buzzing in his blood and his brain made the insanity of it seem somehow beautiful. Holy. He'd wanted his dad to see this, see how resources were poured out on the ground just to wow people. He wished he could see Dad take it in, appalled.

That crazy stupid joy in crazy stupid excess is gone, of course. Vanished with the red kryptonite.

Alicia is gone.

"C.K.?"

"What? Sorry."

Geoff grins at his reverie, mistaking the its source. "Bright lights, big city."

Clark pastes on a smile. "Yeah. It's ... it's really something."

"Just wait. I've got something else to show you." Geoff turns the car into the underbelly of the stadium and leads him onto the field, green and manicured as Las Vegas grass.

Clark lets himself be dazzled.

***

Clark goes out to get the mail, shuffles through the envelopes as he walks back to the house. There's a long envelope on cream stationary. The lawyer's bill, which his parents can't really afford.

He remembers squeezing Alicia's hand in his as they approached the ATM, their giggles barely under control. She kept an eye out while he punched his fist into the machine and gathered the money it spewed. Turning his heat vision on the surveillance camera, he fried all record of their actions, then she teleported them away.

They pretended they'd hit a big payout everywhere they spent their cash -- at the hotel, the wedding chapel, the bridal shop. It was supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride's dress, something like that, but they couldn't keep their hands off one another long enough for Alicia to shop alone. Once his own outfit was taken care of he tried to join her in her dressing room, but a flurry of sales ladies shooed him away so they could help her in and out of the dresses. Clark was handed a glass of champagne without having to prove anything, and led to a white leather chair. Each time she sashayed out in a new dress, the ache in his groin deepened, until the champagne glass shattered in his hand. The sales ladies exclaimed and clucked over him, amazed that he was unhurt.

Once she'd chosen a dress, he counted out money without even registering how much they were spending. Like scattering feed to chickens. Just like Vegas itself, flinging away resources with both hands, unconcerned.

Clark shuffles the lawyer's bill to the back of the stack, which he sets on the kitchen table. He heads to the barn to get started on his homework.

***

Clark hunches over a test paper, writing his name in the top blank. It's important to focus. Now it's his grades that have to get him into college.

He remembers filling out the paperwork in the courthouse. Alicia aimed a hard nudge at his ribs as they headed for the marriage bureau. Clark County Marriage Bureau. Clark Avenue. "Look. It's fate. It's like this whole place is here for you. All the lights and sparkle."

"For us," he said.

It was 11:29 p.m. when they found the bureau, but it was still open. Eager as they were to get the paperwork filled out and handed over, the clerk was a match for their haste. Ten minutes later, they were back on Clark Avenue, license in hand.

"Where's the nearest chapel?" Clark asked the security guard.

They weren't the only ones with that idea. Clark and Alicia had to wait behind three couples. A limo driver waiting for his couple tried to spark a conversation with Fun Facts About Las Vegas. There's a wedding every three minutes in Vegas. It's not just celebrities that can have a two-day marriage -- if you file papers by the end of three days, you can have your marriage erased, like it never happened.

Alicia giggled. "Like when you get fast-talked into new siding for your house, then you change your mind."

Like when you get fast-talked into a wedding by red kryptonite and a pretty girl.

The limo driver went on to other Fun Facts, like the information that you could go see the white tiger that mauled Roy in a habitat at the Mirage. No one blamed the tiger or thought it dangerous. It was just a mishap.

"Somebody has a bizarre idea of pre-wedding chitchat," Alicia said once the driver and his couple left the chapel.

Now Clark wonders if he thought he was performing some kind of service. Clark had found the information useful enough in his white-hot rage. Remembering, he told his parents what the driver had said, and his dad was on the phone to a lawyer practically before he'd finished the sentence.

His marriage is cancelled, never happened. Like siding you thought you wanted (or were persuaded that you wanted) but you decided you really don't.

It was a big joke when he got back to school. _Did you ask for the Brittney Spears special? Hey Dennis, how's Carmen?_

Now nobody will mention her at all.

Clark squeezes his eyes shut. After a moment he rises and takes his test paper to the teacher's desk, blank except for his name.

He walks out of the school building without his coat.

***

Clark sits on the floor of the loft, a wooden box cradled in his hands. It holds some papers, two plain gold bands and, below the folded papers, a necklace in a plastic zip-lock bag. It's safe, as long as it doesn't touch his skin.

He doesn't know how he feels, how he's supposed to feel. The wedding was something that never would have happened, if she hadn't dosed him with red kryptonite. (_Unsound mind_, the grounds they chose from the annulment menu.) But at the time he'd meant it -- he'd come up with the idea on his own -- and now that Alicia is dead, it feels important not to pretend it never happened. He slips the ring on his left hand. What if this is the only wedding band he ever gets to wear? What if she's the only girl who ever knows him and still wants him? He's loved girls and yearned for them, but he never felt that red-hot attraction the way he did with Alicia. Her betrayal should make things simple for him, make it easy to dismiss her as a mistake, but it doesn't.

"Son?" his dad calls out from below. "Your mom nearly has supper on the table."

Clark doesn't answer, doesn't move.

"Clark? It's pork chops tonight, you don't want them drying out."

He pulls the ring off his finger, fumbles it and watches it skip across the wooden floor, bounce up over the lip and tumble into the barn below, winking gold in a shft of late afternoon light as it falls. Clark makes an involuntary sound, a choked cry.

He hears its soft thump of a landing on packed dirt.

A moment later he hears his father's boots on the steps to the loft. He slams the box's lid down, shoves it under the couch. Clark doesn't look at his dad. "Tell Mom I'll be in later and heat something up."

Dad doesn't answer. He crouches beside Clark and opens his hand, the dusty ring in his palm. "You'll want to put this somewhere safe," he says.

_Why?_, he wants to ask. _It's just a fake, a counterfeit Rolex watch, a movie prop, a memento from an event that never actually happened._

When he makes no move to take it, Dad reaches for his hand, puts the ring in his palm and then closes his fingers over it. He holds Clark's fist in both his hands for a moment, without saying a word. He's felt his dad's hands on him many times -- a hug, a hand to the shoulder, a handshake, guiding his hands into the correct position for some new task. They've even come to blows. But he's never touched him this way.

"She's mad at me for marrying Alicia." It's a tight squeeze, fitting these words through the constriction in his throat. "She's mad because we dissolved it. She's mad because I'm taking too long to get back to normal."

"She's not mad, son."

"She _yelled_ at me, Dad. And now she's hardly talking to me."

"She's disappointed for you. She wanted more for you."

"You mean she's disappointed in me. She wanted more from me."

"I meant what I said. She's aching for you right now."

"She has a funny way of showing it."

"You'd be surprised how often that's true about people in general." He shifts from his crouch, settling on the floor. "Anytime you want to talk about this, man-to-man, you know I'm here."

Does getting married make him a man now? _Man-to-man_. Dad's been saying that since Clark was five.

He gazes out toward the shaft of sunlight as if the ring might still be there, suspended in the dust motes, frozen in time. But the beam has moved, growing narrower and sharper, now tinged with red.

"I'm sorry about the money," he says. "If we'd just waited, it wouldn't have cost you anything at all."

"Son," Dad says, and there's enough heartache in his voice for the both of them. "No one gives a damn about the money."

Clark's hand clenches around the ring, and he curls his body like a fist around the hand. Something shifts inside him, a dam breaking, a splintering of hard stone.

Dad's arms snug around him, holding fast as if he'll never get tired.

The light has nearly faded when Clark lifts his head. Nothing at all gets said, man-to-man or otherwise, as they get to their feet, but Dad gives his shoulder a light squeeze before his hand drops to his side.

Clark follows down the stairs, mopping his face with the tail of his plaid shirt, tucking the plain gold band in the pocket of his jeans.


End file.
